


the mouse ran down

by buries



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Future, Established Relationship, F/M, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-05
Updated: 2017-02-05
Packaged: 2018-09-22 04:41:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9584036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buries/pseuds/buries
Summary: tell me the clock one again.or the one where raven builds bellamy more than a clock.





	

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this a few months ago for the prompt, _tired_ , and only just discovered it now. according to my notes, it's set post-s3, so it's an au.
> 
> unbeta'd, all mistakes are mine. the title is from _hickory dickory dock_. thanks for reading. ♥

There comes a time where all the kings horsemen and all the kings men need to stop trying to put the guy who’s made of porcelain back together again.

It’s a rhyme Mom used to tell her as a kid. When she was kinder, her own vices less toxic and her love as warm as a thick woollen blanket, Mom used to tell her all the rhymes. There were clocks, mice striking the hand against them, the ones with three brothers living in various houses and a wolf trying to huff and puff.

She tells him that much now, something she’s said countless times before. He never complains, always listening like it’s the first time she’s remembering this particularly warm memory.

“You sing whenever you tell them to me,” he says. And Raven feels herself blush, the back of her hands pressing against her cheeks to try and cool them.

“I don’t,” she says, and looks at him pointedly, hands falling away as soon as her brow sweeps upward to knock them from where they touch her. It’s almost as if she isn’t aware she’s behaving as if she’s embarrassed. “I don’t sing.”

“You do,” he smiles, and it’s with a sleepy curve to his mouth he regards her. His arm sweeps out to gather her up, and she falls against his chest on his bed. 

His room is much smaller than her workstation, but feels bigger than her own space with how little is inside of it. There’s books piled underneath his bed, in one of the drawers of a dresser she’d asked Monty and Jasper to drag to his room when he’d been on patrol. His clothes aren’t strewn all over the place. She figures, from what he’s told her, Aurora Blake had taught her son to be clean and tidy, leaving no trace of a girl beneath the floorboard behind.

Leave no trace of himself.

But she’s been purposefully fixing that. Leaving his jacket on the floor, her boots tossed against his own, his t-shirt over herself. This space is a mix of them both, and she feels as though it has to be. It’s almost as though he’s afraid of taking up the space that’s rightfully his, needing to leave room for someone else.

If she sings when she recalls those rhymes Mom used to tell her, voice sweet and warm like how the sun hugs her face in the early hours of the morning, so be it. Sometimes she thinks he forgets his mother was his light, too. A brighter one. Space had replaced her mother and had illuminated to the point of almost blinding her, much as Octavia has burned him.

“Tell me the clock one again,” he says one time, and she thinks to do one better.

She makes him a clock with two hands, one smaller than the other, and a mouse running up the length of it. She can’t quite figure out how to make it move, letting it curl its arms around a long, thin piece of metal that hangs in front of the garden on top of the roof of the clock. Sinclair would know how to make it work, but she can’t ask Sinclair for his advice.

But she makes it work, eventually. Bellamy offers her tips, brows furrowed as he tries to explain it in the most basic of terms. His ideas are good, but lack the instruction and supplies she requires to build. She and Monty pour themselves into this clock, figuring out how to make it climb the length of the stick she’d made as an incomplete ladder for the mouse to climb.

The mouse doesn’t necessarily run up and down, but it slides, and sits at the base of the stick, on a little seat that can be used to stop it halfway, and even right at the base of the clock. It’s not the best work, considering the intricate details of some of the items they’ve taken from the mountain before it’d been lost for good, but she thinks it’s better than nothing.

When she gives it to him, her hands are behind her back, and he’s lounging on his bed, book in hand, arm a makeshift pillow for him to rest against. It takes him until he finishes reading his sentence — she knows, given how terse he can be when someone interrupts him inhaling a book like it’s goddamn air, to wait, that he’ll be with her in one second, just let him have this closure for once — to look up at her, and when he does, he lets that book fall slowly to his chest, still open on his page.

His lips curve upward as his eyes narrow. “What are you smiling at?”

She shrugs her shoulders. “At you.”

His eyes narrow even further. “You want something.”

She shakes her head.

“You’re unsettling when you’re smiling.”

She rolls her eyes. “That’s offensive, and I’d hit you, but I’m too busy being awesome.”

“Unsurprising.”

She beams at that.

Pulling himself up against the bed, he shifts his book to his lap, and looks at her expectantly. “What are you hiding?”

Her smile widens, and she almost skips toward him, but her bum leg disallows such a smooth movement. It’s still somewhat of a skip, even if it’s accompanied with a drag of her leg, as she comes to sit on the edge of his bed.

He moves, and his arm’s around her back, hand near her hip, as his body seems to wrap around hers. Bellamy’s hand kneads the bone there, and she thinks nothing of it, leaning into it rather than scurrying away. The clock sits in her lap, and she looks down at it, watching him from the corner of her eye.

“A clock,” she says. “To help you tell the time. Kane says you suck at that.”

“I was late _once_.”

“ _One_ too many times, Blake,” she shakes her head, and tuts. “I thought you were a badass.”

“Guess not,” he shrugs. He’s looking at her, then the clock. “This is the clock, isn’t it? The one you sing about.”

“ _Talk._ ” She turns to look at him, eyebrows arched, and she watches as he laughs quietly. Shyly, she continues with a shrug of her shoulder, “And … it might be.”

His smile widens, and she passes it off to him, holding it out for him to take.

Bellamy hesitates for a moment before he accepts it, and rests properly against his pillows. A few more than what’s necessary, but given how she’s a kind soul and Octavia’s trying to mend a bridge, he has several on his small cot that make it almost the bed everyone wishes to be on.

Once upon a time, that happened to be true.

“It’s —”

“Awesome, I know,” she says with a big smile. She watches his long fingers and big hands hold it, travelling over it, feeling the dents she’s purposefully put into it to create a clock with leaves on the roof, as though it’s truly a house for the mouse to climb up into.

“Thanks, Raven,” he says, and when he looks up, she glances down at his hands.

“You have to hang it up.” She shifts on the bed, almost bouncing. “So I don’t have to sing that damn song again.”

He looks at her pointedly.

She rolls her eyes. “A slip of the tongue, Bellamy.”

He moves the mouse along the length of the pole she’s made, watching it as he stops and moves it, letting it climb, think about its journey, climb higher, than down it goes to the base once more. “You going to sing it? One last time?”

And so she does.


End file.
